Nobel Prize Winner Monrovia High Grad

Thomas Sargent was supposed to attend his 50th high school reunion last weekend, but cancelled last minute, reports the Pasadena Star News.

"We just had our class reunion this weekend," according to Don Samuels, who was in the class of 1961 with Sargent at Monrovia High, as reported by the Star News. "When he didn't show up, now we now why."

It turns out, Sargent and another American, Christopher Sims, had just won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Sargent now teaches at New York University and is a visiting professor at Princeton University, while Sims is a professor at Princeton.

The two Americans, both 68, were honored for their research in the 1970s and `80s on the cause-and-effect relationship between the economy and government policy.

Among their achievements, the two Nobel laureates - working separately for the most part over the years - devised tools to analyze how changes in interest rates and taxes affect growth and inflation.

The focus of their work was to create mathematical models that central bankers and other leaders can use to devise policy proposals.

Sargent and Sims have been friends since the 1960s, when both were Harvard graduate students. They later taught at the same time at the University of Minnesota. This semester, they are teaching a graduate-level macroeconomics course together at Princeton.

The awards will be handed Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death.